Colonization and Christianity. William Howitt
species of rapacity and villany, till the astonished and outraged inhabitants now finding them fiends incarnate instead of the superior beings which they had deemed them, rose in wrath, and exterminated them.
Columbus formed a fresh settlement for his newcomers, and having defended it with mounds and ramparts of earth, went on a short voyage of discovery among the West Indian isles, and came back to find that the same scene of lust and rapine had been acted over again by his colony, and that the natives were all in arms for their destruction. It is curious to read the relation of the conduct of Columbus on this discovery, as given by Robertson, a Christian and Protestant historian. He tells us, on the authority of Herrera, and of the son of Columbus himself, that the Spaniards had outraged every human and sacred feeling of these their kind and hospitable entertainers. That in the voracity of their appetites, enormous as compared with the simple temperance of the natives, they had devoured up the maize and cassado-root, the chief sustenance of these poor people; that their rapacity threatened a famine; that the natives saw them building forts and locating themselves as permanent settlers where they had apparently come merely as guests; and that from their lawless violence as well as their voracity, they must soon suffer destruction in one shape or another from their oppressors. Self preservation prompted them to take arms for the expulsion of such formidable foes. “It was now,” adds Robertson, “necessary to have recourse to arms; the employing of which against the Indians, Columbus had hitherto avoided with the greatest solicitude.” Why necessary? Necessary for what? is the inquiry which must spring indignantly in every rightly-constituted mind. Because the Spaniards had been received with unexampled kindness, and returned it with the blackest ingratitude; because they had by their debauched and horrible outrages roused the people into defiance, those innocent and abused people must be massacred? That is a logic which might do for men who had been educated in the law of anti-Christ instead of Christ, and who went out with the Pope’s bull as a title to seize on the property of other people, wherever the abused and degraded cross had not been erected; but it could never have been so coolly echoed by a Protestant historian, if it had not been for the spurious morality with which the Papal hierarchy had corrupted the world, till it became as established as gospel truth. Hear Robertson’s relation of the manner in which Columbus repaid the Christian reception of these poor islanders.
“The body which took the field consisted only of two hundred foot, twenty horse, and twenty large dogs; and how strange soever it may seem to mention the last as composing part of a military force, they were not perhaps the least formidable and destructive on the whole, when employed against naked and timid Indians. All the caziques in the island, Guacanahari excepted, who retained an inviolable attachment to the Spaniards, were in arms, with forces amounting—if we may believe the Spanish historians—to a hundred thousand men. Instead of attempting to draw the Spaniards into the fastnesses of the woods and mountains, they were so improvident as to take their station in the Vega Real, the most open plain in the country. Columbus did not allow them to perceive their error, or to alter their position. He attacked them during the night, when undisciplined troops are least capable of acting with union and concert, and obtained an easy and bloodless victory. The consternation with which the Indians were filled by the noise and havoc made by the fire-arms, by the impetuous force of the cavalry, and the fierce onset of the dogs, was so great, that they threw down their weapons, and fled without attempting resistance. Many were slain; more were taken prisoners and reduced to servitude; and so thoroughly were the rest intimidated, that, from that moment, they abandoned themselves to despair, relinquishing all thoughts of contending with aggressors whom they deemed invincible.
“Columbus employed several months in marching through the island, and in subjecting it to the Spanish government, without meeting with any opposition. He imposed a tribute upon all the inhabitants above the age of fourteen. Every person who lived in those districts where gold was found, was obliged to pay quarterly as much gold-dust as filled a hawk’s bell; from those in other parts of the country, twenty-five pounds of cotton were demanded. This was the first regular taxation of the Indians, and served as a precedent for exactions still more intolerable.”
This is a most extraordinary example of the Christian mode of repaying benefits! These were the very people thus treated, that a little time before had received with tears, and every act of the most admirable charity, Columbus and his people from the wreck. And a Protestant historian says that this was necessary! Again we ask, necessary for what? To shew that Christianity was hitherto but a name, and an excuse for the violation of every human right! There was no necessity for Columbus to repay good with evil; no necessity for him to add the crime of Jezebel, “to kill and take possession.” If he really wanted to erect the cross in the new world, and to draw every legitimate benefit for his own country from it he had seen that all that might be effected by legitimate means. Kindness and faith were only wanted to lay open the whole of the new world, and bring all its treasures to the feet of his countrymen. The gold and gems might be purchased even with the toys of European children; and commerce and civilization, if permitted to go on hand in hand, presented prospects of wealth and glory, such as never yet had been revealed to the world. But Columbus, though he believed himself to have been inspired by the Holy Ghost to discover America—thus commencing his will, “In the name of the most Holy Trinity, who inspired me with the idea, and who afterwards made it clear to me, that by traversing the ocean westwardly, etc.;” though Herrera calls him a man “ever trusting in God;” and though his son, in his history of his life, thus speaks of him:—“I believe that he was chosen for this great service; and that because he was to be so truly an apostle, as in effect he proved to be, therefore was his origin obscure; that therein he might the more resemble those who were called to make known the name of the Lord from seas and rivers, and from courts and palaces. And I believe also, that in most of his doings he was guarded by some special providence; his very name was not without some mystery; for in it is expressed the wonder he performed, inasmuch as he conveyed to the new world the grace of the Holy Ghost.” Notwithstanding these opinions—Columbus had been educated in the spurious Christianity, which had blinded his naturally honest mind to every truly Christian sentiment. It must be allowed that he was an apostle of another kind to those whom Christ sent out; and that this was a novel way of conveying the Holy Ghost to the new world. But he had got the Pope’s bull in his pocket, and that not only gave him a right to half the world, but made all means for its subjection, however diabolical, sacred in his eyes. We see him in this transaction, notwithstanding the superiority of his character to that of his followers, establishing himself as the apostle and founder of that system of destruction and enslavement of the Americans, which the Spaniards followed up to so horrible an extent. We see him here as the first to attack them, in their own rightful possessions, with arms—the first to pursue them with those ferocious dogs, which became so infamously celebrated in the Spanish outrages on the Americans, that some of them, as the dog Berezillo, received the full pay of soldiers; the first to exact gold from the natives; and to reduce them to slavery. Thus, from the first moment of modern discovery, and by the first discoverer himself, commenced that apostleship of misery which has been so zealously exercised towards the natives of all newly discovered countries up to this hour!
The immediate consequences of these acts of Columbus were these: the natives were driven to despair by the labours and exactions imposed upon them. They had never till then known what labour, or the curse of avarice was; and they formed a scheme to drive out their oppressors by famine. They destroyed the crops in the fields, and fled into the mountains. But there, without food themselves, they soon perished, and that so rapidly and miserably, that in a few months one-third of the inhabitants of the whole island had disappeared! Fresh succours arrived from Spain, and soon after, as if to realize to the afflicted natives all the horrors of the infernal regions, Spain, and at the suggestions of Columbus too, emptied all her gaols, and vomited all her malefactors on their devoted shores! A piece of policy so much admired in Europe, that it has been imitated by all other colonizing nations, and by none so much as by England! The consequences of this abominable system soon became conspicuous in the distractions, contentions, and disorders of the colony; and in order to soothe and appease these, Columbus resorted to fresh injuries on the natives, dividing their lands amongst his mutinous followers, and giving away the inhabitants—the real possessors—along with them as slaves! Thus he was the originator of those Repartimentos, or distribution of the Indians